 Thank you so much. So I'm Sarah Anderson. I'm with the Institute for Policy Studies and like many people in this room I consider myself a veteran of the 2017 tax policy battle. Can we can we hear it from some of the other Veterans of that battle in the room. I'm still I'm still nursing my wounds a little bit I have to say it doesn't help that almost every day I read about corporate CEOs cashing in on their windfalls from the corporate tax cuts But I really agree with Frank Clementi who's here from Americans for tax fairness He has said so many times that we might have lost the legislative battle in late 2017 but we won the battle for public opinion in that fight and It's been really exciting for me to see that people totally get it that we cannot just the goal Cannot be just to go back to where we were in 2017 in our time of extreme inequality We need to go much bigger and bolder and at IPS It's been so exciting to be working with groups at the ground level like the poor people's campaign and jobs with Justice who are taking on the tax fight like they never have before We're gonna hear more from them this afternoon But I'm really excited now because I get to moderate this panel with the people who've been really doing the nitty-gritty Policy work that is so critical to support these movement groups and We're gonna be hearing today first from Chai Ching Hwang of Center on Budget and Policy Priority She's gonna talk about income taxes Then we're gonna move on to how can we make a dent in these Accumulated grand fortunes and first we'll hear from Lily Badchelder from the NYU Law School about wealth taxes And then from Greg Lyerson of the Washington Center on Equitable Growth about estate and insurance taxes inheritance taxes and then finally we'll hear from Josh Bevan's of EPI on this Proposal for a surtax on the top 0.1% that would apply to both ordinary income and income from investment So we will start out first with Chai Ching Hwang All right, so my job as you've heard is to cover how we can fix individual income and business taxation To be the tax the rich in about six minutes There are so many ways our friends at the Center for American Progress Americans for tax fairness IT, Equitable Growth, many others in the room have all got great reports that set out menus of many progressive revenue-raising options and of course the Center on Budget will add to that genre and due course with our own report But rather than going through the specific items on the menu I'm going to make a more general case that many of those excellent items are complementary We're at a part of the political cycle where there's a tendency to focus on contrasts and competition between ideas But as policy advocates and analysts, we can also pay attention to the ways that many options for taxing the rich Are in fact do in fact strengthen and complement each other There are real trade-offs and choices to be made pros and cons to be considered But we shouldn't get pulled too far into false choices when it comes to addressing the very many parts of the tax code that we Need to fix if we're to adequately tax the incomes of the very rich So let me present to you six sets of compliments First to tax the incomes of the rich Effectively we need to better tax all of their sources of income both from wealth and from work And that means paying attention to all different parts of the tax code Now for most households the biggest source of income is compensation for work wages and salaries and the like By contrast those at the very top get a much larger share of their incomes from things like businesses Real estate think dividends the growth in the in the value of businesses Lots of that income never shows up on tax returns And if it does it faces lower rates than taxes on income from work And my co-panelists are going to set out some really great ways to address these big holes in the tax code so and those are very direct ways at getting at that problem and In ways that turn out to be very complimentary to ensure that the very well off face tax on all of their income We also need to adequately tax their income from labor One reason why is that income from work is also very concentrated at the top not as extremely Concentrated as inherited wealth or income from capital gains, but still quite concentrated So about 10% of all labor income goes to the top 1% Think about CEO pay and how that's been doing relative to the pay of ordinary workers Another reason why is that the tax advisers of the very wealthy are very good at finding ways to report income as Whatever kind it is that will get the lower rate so While the tax return data Tells us a story where it may look as though we're doing a little bit better at taxing the labor income of the very Wealthy than their income from capital gains and so on What's a lot of what's really the labor income of the very rich might in fact be showing up on tax returns As business income or capital gains and in fact facing quite low tax rates The 2017 tax law took us in the wrong direction on that is as very many other things and opened up larger and more Lucrative holes in the tax code that high-income people can try to use to avoid the top individual income tax rates What their advisers are now calling a bonanza of loopholes and planning opportunities? They can pretend that their income from work is the income of a pass-through business and Report that business income on their individual tax return and just for doing that they get a 20% discount on the top tax rate Recent research suggests that even before this giant new tax avoidance opportunity This The a large share of income of so-called pass-through businesses was actually just the labor income of very high earners disguised as business income to get lower tax rates and tax benefits The law is very very deep cut in the corporate rate also means that Corporate taxes are a newly attractive option for the wealthy to shelter income in to get a much lower corporate tax rate So to ensure that the very rich pay more tax on their economic incomes We need to address all of this stuff comprehensively capital gains and pass-through income and corporate income and ordinary income that shows up as salaries and wages and transfers of extraordinary wealth Otherwise the income of the rich will just find a way to whatever effective rate is lowest They will find a way to the crack in the dam and and find where that dam is weakest and As we heard from representative Shackowsky There are there are ways of putting together packages that include items from across this menu and strengthen the dam across its length Second and similarly broadening tax bases and increasing tax rates are two great tastes that taste great together If you brought in the base it limits tax breaks that lawmakers put into the code deliberately also reduces loop holes that Have accidentally made into made their way into the code And doing that ensures that more income faces the top statutory rates So for every percentage point you increase this top statutory rate The less inefficient tax avoidance you'll get and the more revenue you'll raise Third federal and state and local opportunities are bound States can make progress on taxing the rich immediately in their states Better taxation of capital gains estates and all and so on But also some of the more fundamental reforms that we'll hear about would make it Administratively much easier for the states to do more on taxing the incomes of the very rich Fourth proposals to tax the the extremely extremely wealthy and the merely very very wealthy Can also coexist and we've heard that from Professor Krugman before so I won't go over that ground but Again, all of the above it may be a way forward through that And finally we should Sorry fifth we should both change policy to shut down avenues for tax avoidance and we need to adequately Fund the depleted IRS 25% cut in enforcement funding over the last Eight or nine years 30% cut in enforcement staff and guess what it's the audits of millionaires and the wealthiest corporations that are down the most and Finally, we've heard a lot about non-tax ideas In competition law and democracy and minimum wage and labor market reform and immigration All of those are highly complementary with the tax ideas that we're talking about as well so my answer and Whoever's tallying up the ballots will see the right in answer For question three all of the above please that that was me I would just there are real trade-offs, but I'll just make a plea to think about also the ways in which We can be stronger together with some of these different ideas well, thank you for having me today and for organizing this incredible conference and Just to mix things up a bit. I'm actually going to be talking about wealth transfers and Greg is going to be talking about Taxing wealth and capital income, although I think we're both equally passionate about each other subjects. So so I'm going to focus on one of the largest components of Income and wealth which is wealth transfers. I'm not sure if the slides are coming up But each year they're about great each year there are about $500 billion of bequests and Inheritances represent about 40% of all wealth and about 4% of household income. So they're very large I think taxing wealth transfers is key to reducing Economic inequality and it does so in ways that the other taxes cannot completely even though I totally agree with chi-ching that we need an all of the above approach So there are two kinds of economic inequality that I think policy makers should care about and the first is economic Disparities within generation and wealth transfers increase this kind of inequality on an absolute basis They don't actually on a relative basis, which we can talk about if anyone's interested But equally important is inequality of economic opportunity and as you can see on this chart It's very small, but the US is all the way in the top right Which means that we're both highly unequal in terms of income and wealth and all those measures But we're also have very low levels of intergenerational economic mobility And we're basically tied with Italy and the United Kingdom in terms of how much of a Fathers economic advantage or disadvantage is passed on to his son and all the other countries, which are also high-income countries Have much more economic mobility across generations than we do So what this means is that in the US to an especially large extent Economic disparities reflect the luck of your birth and not hard work or even other kinds of luck during life Financial Inheritances worsen this kind of inequality dramatically according to one study the effect of them on Intergenerational immobility is larger than the effects of IQ schooling and personality combined And they're also distributed very unequally so you can see in this chart The higher income you are the more you tend to inherit if I had ranked everybody by their Inheritance size the top 1% of inheritors receive about a quarter of all bequests So increasing the progressivity of income and payroll taxes and creating a wealth tax Would go a long way towards addressing both of these types of inequality The chart on the prior page showed that the two are pretty closely correlated economic inequality and intergenerational immobility But there would still be big holes if this wasn't covered coupled with stronger taxes on wealth transfers So let's just take an example of a wealthy person who bequeaths a hundred million dollars And it's all in stock from a company that she founded and so she hasn't actually paid any capital gains tax on that stock Under current law there's a provision called stepped-up basis The donor doesn't have to pay tax on that hundred million dollar gain because she hasn't stole the stock It also means that the heir doesn't have to pay tax on that hundred million dollar gain when they sell the stock To the extent that the gain accrued up to the point where they received the stock So all of that capital gains tax is forgiven forever Heirs also never have to pay tax under the income or payroll tax on the amounts They inherit so even if that hundred million dollars of stock didn't have an accrued gain You don't have to pay tax on receiving a hundred million dollars So what that means is the income and payroll tax rates on inherited income are essentially zero percent Now wealth transfer taxes pay play a really key role in addressing this unfairness But they are so limited right now and they've eroded so much over time That this chart chart shows that the tax rate on inherited income is only about a quarter of the rate on income from work and savings and all of that tax is from the estate tax, which is pretty limited So there's three ways I want to talk about that we could improve wealth transfer taxes The first is to repeal stepped-up basis so that accrued gains on the queefed acts assets are taxed immediately Each year there's hundreds of billions of dollars In capital gains that escape taxation and one option is to tax these accrued gains When the air sells the asset like we do for gifts made during life This would raise about a hundred and five billion dollars over the decade Obama proposed a more robust version of this which would tax the accrued gains at the time the air received the inheritance And also he would have raised the capital gains rate a bit by four point two percentage points There would be some exemptions and this proposal would have raised two hundred and sixty five billion It also would have been very progressive the top 1% would have borne 99% of the burden and the top one in a thousand would have borne 80% of the burden So the second way that we can improve wealth transfer taxes is to improve the estate tax and strengthen it after the 2017 bill the estate tax now only applies to bequests per couple over $22.8 million and it's only 40% on amounts over that threshold So last year it was only paid by about 1900 estates which is less than one in a thousand in the US it raised about 15 billion One option I listed here is to go back to 2009 lot which had a seven million per couple exemption and a 45% rate that would raise about five hundred sorry two hundred and seventy billion and A more aggressive option would be to raise the top rate on larger estates if it peaked at sixty five percent On a states over a billion it would raise about five hundred and twenty billion dollars And this has been proposed by a number of members of congress including standards Former senator Clinton Warren Booker and Shikowsky And it sounds like She's actually going to be moving into the next and final option. I wanted to discuss Which is to replace an estate tax with an inheritance tax So an inheritance tax is different in that the rate depends on how much the heirs receive rather than how much is bequeathed and Under my preferred approach we just eliminate the income tax exemption For transfers over a certain amount and apply a fifteen percent surtax on top of that to reflect the payroll tax So if this exemption was two point one million per air it would raise about two hundred and seventy billion And if it was one and a quarter million it would raise about five hundred billion And I'm really excited that representative Shikowsky has announced that she's going to be pursuing this approach So as this side explains The main difference between an estate tax and inheritance tax is that the tax rates lower under an inheritance tax If you have lots of heirs and it's higher if you have fewer heirs So the result is that they different burden different people and you can see that in the Venn diagram On a dollar basis though the difference isn't that dramatic. It's about 30 percent difference in Who is burdened by the tax? so instead I think the main advantage is political and A state tax opponents as you all heard have billed the estate tax as a harsh tax on hard-working Generous small business owners, especially tons of farmers just at the moment. They die Nothing could actually be further from the truth on the New York Times and American Farm Bureau have never found a farm that has been sold to pay the estate tax and Experts on the left and right agree that it is borne by heirs and not by the deceit But I think the advantage of inheritance tax is it shifts the form of the tax to reflect the economic reality Which is that in both cases with an estate and inheritance tax Their taxes on privileged heirs who have inherited so much that they don't have to ever work again if they don't want And if we didn't have either tax we wouldn't they wouldn't owe a dime on the amounts that they're inherited So with that I'll turn it over to Greg Thank you It's a pleasure to be here today to talk about different ways to tax wealth Right and sort of my my goal in the next five minutes or so is to walk through sort of how how you can tax Wealth in different ways how they relate to each other and what each of them is doing Let's start first with a couple of definitions First what is wealth right wealth is the value of everything you own at a particular point in time So you add up a financial asset like a bank account to 401k stocks bonds mutual funds non-financial assets like real estate or a business house cars works of art what have you yachts Subtract off Debt like a mortgage or other forms of borrowing and that's your wealth That's what you have at a point in time right income on the other hand is a flow It's the resources you gain over a period of time so you can think about wages and salaries about Interest and dividends profits from a business. These are all forms of income and the key idea to keep in mind as we think about Taxing wealth is that wealth generates income so bonds pay interest Stocks pay dividends businesses generate profits real estate generates rents and all of these different forms of assets can increase in value and all of the In all of these ways wealth generates income So we can tax wealth either by taxing the wealth itself or by taxing the income from wealth So imagine for a moment that you had a fifty million dollars and over the course of a year that generates two million dollars of income Right we could tax one percent of that wealth to generate five hundred thousand dollars We could tax twenty five percent of that income to also generate five hundred thousand dollars Right so we can tax the wealth or we can tax the income from wealth and through either route We can achieve very similar ends and so that takes us to sort of the three basic approaches to taxing wealth First is sort of the classic wealth tax. This is the percentage of wealth paid annually in tax So you have fifty million dollars you pay one percent or five hundred thousand dollars in tax Right the second approach. This is what's called mark-to-market taxation by economists You may also hear the term a cruel taxation pay as you grow taxation is as representative Shikowsky suggested Right. These are all sort of the same thing and it's a the most comprehensive approach to taxing the income from wealth And the key thing you do under this approach is you include in your taxable income every year The increase in the value of all of your assets regardless of whether you sell them or not Right so you have a fifty million dollar stock portfolio that increases in value to sixty million right that's ten million dollars of income That you include on your tax return That's the idea of of mark-to-market or a cruel based taxation right the third approach is known as the deferral charge This is sort of the most technical or complex of these approaches It's also the closest to current law in an important sense And the way it works is you continue to tax investment gains when assets are sold So if I sell my stock portfolio, I subtract the purchase price from the the Proceeds and that differences income right that's the way it works under current law. What's wrong with that approach well assume I I sold ten million I stole the stock portfolio for ten million dollars of gain, right? I did that this year I didn't earn that money this year. I might have held those assets for a decade, right? But over that decade I was reporting no income and paying no tax, right? A worker on the other hand They're working that entire ten-year period right each year they get wages They report those wages on their tax return and they pay tax, right? I was earning money reporting no income and paying no tax And so I was fundamentally getting an interest-free loan from the government every single year along the way by virtue of holding my wealth Or earning my income in the form of income from wealth, right? And so the deferral charge is the interest on that loan It says we're going to continue to tax assets when you sell them But you have to pay us the interest on that loan you got for the entire past decade So that's the deferral charge approach Now all three of these approaches are about the structure of the tax system They're about the ways we tax wealth and the income from wealth You can use whatever rates you want and whatever exclusions and so forth with each of these approaches And that's particularly important for the the last two approaches the mark-to-market approach and the deferral charge approach These are both taxing the income from wealth and they operate as sort of reforms to the existing tax system And as you as others have discussed right? We have preferential rates for capital gains and dividends under current law right when you implement these reforms You would also repeal or you could repeal and should repeal the preferential rates for capital gains and dividends at the same time Part of the reason to adopt these reforms is they shut down avoidant strategies wealthy investors use To avoid paying tax on their gains So if you enact these reforms first or at the same time as you raise rates You're gonna raise a lot more revenue from raising the rates than you would if you didn't implement these reforms And thus still retain a variety of strategies that wealthy taxpayers could use to avoid paying tax on their income now the other thing I want to touch on here as Representative Shikowsky suggested you can mix and match from this menu Based on which types of taxes will work better for which assets So you can use a mark-to-market approach for publicly traded securities where there are observable values for these Stocks or bonds out there that we can just read that you can report those values on your your tax return every year And we can measure them and know what they are But you might use the deferral charge approach for assets where they're harder to value And so we use the sales price effectively as a means of valuing the assets Rate the set the price at which the asset is sold is the basis for valuing the gains along the way Right, so you can mix and match these different approaches, right? We use the property tax on on real estate at the local government level, right? We can mix and match these across taxes in sort of whatever mix Sort of most effectively solves our administrative compliance and political challenges Now I've suggested all three of these taxes are very similar. They're doing very similar things What could we expect from any of them the revenue potential is quite large? Think a trillion dollars plus over the next decade for each of these obviously if you you change the rates You can move those numbers around a lot, but you know the numbers are big And in terms of progressivity these are among the most progressive policy options Available to policy makers both because the distribution of wealth itself is highly skewed and because you can further Target each of these proposals to the top 1% or the top 0.1% through your choice of exemption And obviously there are relationships between the revenue raise and the progressivity depending on how you set your rates and how you Target it so that's the top-level overview of the three basic ways to tax wealth. Thank you Yeah, Josh is going next, sorry Okay Do I just go one more Okay, sorry, I will say a couple words while well queues up I'm gonna talk about a much more specific proposal than some of the previous ones gonna argue that one of the very first Tools we take out of the toolkit as we do progressive tax reform Hopefully incoming years is a surtax on high-income households And I think if this is yes queued up now I'm just gonna start with you know why a surtax is a good idea I mean frankly, this is why progressive taxation generally is a good idea But I'm gonna argue it applies specifically to the surtax This is a chart that basically shows how different the economic experience of the top 0.1 percent has been relative to everyone else in the Economy and so what you have on the vertical axis is average annual income growth and on the horizontal axis You have households ranked from poorest to richest This is pre and post tax. I mean a couple things should stand out from this one is the richer You are the faster your average income growth has been it's extremely non-linear the top 0.1% has seen a radically different experience Even then it's sort of peers in the rest of the top 1% and so that that's I think why we are appropriately focusing on that I think the other really striking thing from this is the the top has seen such incredibly rapid growth and is pulled up the Overall average so much that fully about 85% of families saw income growth lower than average over that time period And that should strike everyone is a little bit strange And I would say that the US economy has been pretty strange because of this The over these same decades where you see this really big increase in inequality Tax policy has been much less equalizing that top line is the average effective tax rate all in all kinds of taxes federal state local On the top 0.1% that bottom line is the same thing for the bottom 90% There used to be a really wide difference between these two lines that has converged a lot So as inequality has risen enormously tax policy has actually become less equalizing over that time Something others have mentioned a really key thing if you want to tax the incomes of the top 0.1% You have to tax capital income This is a figure that shows the share of overall income by income groups that is accounted for by capital income in this And this includes and it's complicated, but it's probably even a little higher That's probably too high for the bottom 90% it includes imputed rent from owning your homes But still the point is the top 0.1% has a much higher share of income coming from capital-based incomes than everyone else Even again their peers and the rest of the top 1% So that's the backdrop And I think one thing that's becoming really clear in this whole discussion is that when it comes to getting an equitable share Of revenue from the rich and using tax policy to level the economic playing field more broadly There's not going to be one single silver bullet We need a big toolkit in large part because the rich are so good at sort of adapting to any single change in the tax code I'd also say for the full bore progressive agenda that we want to do Eventually, we're going to have to get a bigger contribution from members of the middle class if we really want to do ambitious spending That said, I think there's a really strong case to be made for having at hand an Explicitly and laser focused progressive tax that can be one of the first things out of the toolkit That can raise enough money for a significant increase in social insurance or public investment It can cut through some of the Gordian knots of complexity from income shifting that people here have talked about And also a tax that does not spill over at all onto the middle class I think it could be really useful as a confidence-building measure when we tell people we want to get a much bigger Contribution from the rich and we want to build a better society from it having the first thing out of the gate Just not spill over at all on to the middle class. I think it can be a really useful thing I would say many tax changes we want to do are really progressive overall like say a capital gains tax increase But there will be some middle-class household to pay higher taxes. That's fine again, though I think the value of a surtax which I'll talk about in a second is that there's no spillover at all And so let me just talk a little bit about what this surtax is Basically a surtax would take another ten percentage points off the top of all adjusted gross income over a two million dollar threshold Two million dollar threshold. It's really close to the top zero point one percent I would argue it's not even in the neighborhood of anyone's consumption of middle class and so that there's not that idea At the risk of lecturing a group that knows better about what marginal tax rates are if you do not make two million dollars You will pay zero extra with this surtax If you make exactly two million dollars, you will pay zero extra if you make three million dollars a year You'll pay the surtax on that million dollars above the threshold. That's an extra hundred thousand dollars That sounds like a lot of money to normal people. That's a lot of money That will increase their tax rate by about three point three percentage points I think they'll live and the real value of this surtax is the money it raises from people who make well above three million dollars a year I Would say this chart is just meant to convince you yet again. There's very little spillover I'm not going to linger on it too much But that horizontal line is where the surtax hits that is sort of household incomes going from the Bottom all the way up to the ninety nine point ninth percent as you can see very little spillover And so finally the question is you know, how much? All right, my last one disappeared. How much revenue would it raise? Basically, it would raise on the order of seventy five billion dollars in the first year It would get to over eight hundred billion dollars over a ten-year period. How much money is this? You know, it's not single-payer money But it is enough money to make a really ambitious investment in America's kids If you look at estimates for what universal high quality pre-k is for all three and four year olds That's about forty billion dollars if you add on top of that sort of capping early child care expenses at say seven percent of Family income that's probably another forty billion this gets you enough to make a serious investment in children under the age of five and One thing I had you know, we should make that investment We are really stingy when it comes to money We spend on kids relative to other rich nations around the world and so I think And I think the surtax could could turn that around and I just note it has a pedigree It was part of the Affordable Care Act version that passed out of the House of Representatives or a version of it was Unfortunately, it did not become well then the upside to that is it's sitting out there. We should put it to use Okay before we open it up to the audience for Q&A I just want to give the panelists a chance to comment on the interplay between some of the ideas that you've been talking about I heard Lily and Chai Cheng both saying you know with regard to the ballot that they're for all of the above But do you want to add any more about how they might? Interact with each other I also heard Josh say it might not be a bad idea to have the surtax idea be first out of the gate because it doesn't spill over to The middle class in any way. Do you have thoughts on sequencing or the the connections between the different proposals? one thing to bear in mind is a key benefit of the mark-to-market or accrual tax proposal that Greg mentioned is Currently and we could probably have a very long debate about whether this is true The JCT and CBO estimate that if you raise the capital gains rate above about 28 or 30 percent you start losing revenue and the reason is that people respond by deferring the realization of gains even more and so I think one thing to bear in mind is as We increase the tax rates on ordinary income and hopefully increase the tax rates on capital gains as well It becomes more and more important to start thinking about Proposals along the lines that Greg and representative Shikowsky laid out at least in terms of how they estimate these proposals Prevent that gaming of the system anyone else want to weigh in on this So I'll say one thing. I think it's exactly right that all there's an important all of the above element to all of these proposals I think sort of where the the interactions between them perhaps become more important Is that we might dial the particular rates or the particular uses we put each proposal to? differently in a different context and so one way one example of this is you could think of using a wealth tax as As the basis for your system of taxing capital income and wealth broadly Or you could think of using a mark-to-market or accrual System is the basis for taxing capital income broadly and then use a wealth tax as more of a targeted tool against wealth inequality There's still in this world of all of these are great tastes that go together as Chang said But if you sort of zoom in a little bit you might might target them or different ways or you the exact rates You choose to set might be slightly different depending on which ones you've used elsewhere Did you want to add anything to that? To try another extended food metaphor if you've if you've been to dim sum or yum char You can put together a really great meal lots and lots of different ways You you probably don't want to order no veggies or like 12 servings of veggies So so you do kind of probably want like Greg Greg listed sort of three major ways of getting at the same sorts of Income or wealth broadly defined You probably don't want each of those on every single asset But you want to choose pick and choose between them for the different asset types and also think about how it fits in with And you're sort of brought a meal in terms of are you are you using this sort of wealth approach as a somewhat of a backstop A targeted approach to pick up some other things that aren't being got at by income tax reforms or a sort of a Different base that's complimentary Yeah, just just a couple thoughts, I mean, I think it's true. These are all super strongly complementary to each other I would say just to be clear if I wasn't clear the adjusted gross income the surtax applies to includes capital gains And so it's true if you if you really thought you're already near the revenue maximizing rate, which you know who knows But that that's what some people will say then you definitely want to do some of the base broadening and the other sort of Fundamental changes to make sure the surtax isn't somehow pushing you above that and sacrificing some of the revenue I would say as well, you know, there's not just gonna be one progressive tax reform that happens over the next I mean, I hope not. I hope there's many and that's not the way it usually works And I would say one one way to think about it is I think you've got a lot of the base broadening that I think is Really good for sort of the the centerpiece tax reform bill and then you have a lot of things that just Needed social spending that requires a pay for And that's where I think the more specific proposals you can attach those to and so I think that that's Two ways to think about it as well. What is the overarching structure of the tax system versus what are very specific pieces that we can Tag to really valuable social spending Great. Well, why don't we open it up to the audience and we've got our Mike people here and and so forth Yeah, and I do I see wonky people in the audience and political people and Activists don't anybody can ask questions of these folks. So don't Thank you. I'm dr. Caroline Poplin, and I'm certainly not an expert, but and I was late Is someone going to talk about the corporate tax that big? Oh, all right. Yes. Yes, but It's easier in some ways because it doesn't hit particular individuals and Corporations should be paying for the roads and the bridges in the infrastructure that they all use Certainly the biggest part of the Republican tax Perfect opening to something that I sort of wished I could spend more time on I Think I think it's absolutely right We should be looking beyond undoing the impacts of the 2017 tax law But there are a lot of really terrible impacts that we can be undoing as well And the changes in the corporate tax were you know the driver both in policy terms and in political terms of that entire Bill and about a third of the corporate tax rate cut goes to the top 1% about 20% goes to the top 0.1% and As I said it is in part of in terms of a comprehensive approach to taxing the incomes of the very wealthy Leaving that shelter hanging out there for people to put their income in if even if you address some of these other other parts of The tax code is a really a really damaging thing. So that is something we should absolutely be looking to undo raise effective corporate rates Both in terms of the rate and the base The pass-through deduction was another one that I didn't linger on but about half of that goes to millionaires and Again a lot of that income is already disguised labor income of the very wealthy So it's effectively creating a venue to make the top individual income tax rates Optional for high wealth people who have good enough tax advisers to get them around the very complicated guardrails of the law We're gonna go from front to back and then back up Hi, Olivia Allen from the children's funding project. I'm curious about I don't want to distract from the conversation about national approaches, but I'm curious about what you think about vertical alignment between state and federal approaches when it comes to Advocating for some of these things. Um, so we find it easier to work sometimes at the state level But get a lot of pushback from folks at the federal level who are trying to pass similar potentially conflicting items, I Think it's a great idea to be pushing almost all of these ideas at a state level I mean, I will say that some of them are fairly complex So it would be a heavy lift which does it mean that it wouldn't be great for states to work on them for example, you know moving to mark to market or major changes to the corporate tax base or inheritance tax would Take a fair amount of time to draft and think through all of the ways to prevent loopholes So I think it'd be great for states to take this on but there is a certain advantage to doing so federally And then I add that if we can get these through federally That makes it a lot easier for the states to piggyback on this a lot of the states their income tax code He's off of what federal law is and so once you had a a cruel tax or mark to market system in place federally Then it'd be really easy for the states just to say, okay, we're gonna tax that income too But it's much harder for them to do so at least technically on their own If I could just push on that a little bit more I'm sure you've all heard the argument that if you do stuff at the state level to go after the very rich That those people will just move away What's your response for that? It's not borne out by the evidence one of my colleagues here Liz McNichol can speak much more directly to that but but in terms of underscoring Lily's point She's put out another one of these great genres of menus of options where states can move immediately on a number of these fronts Put the investments towards put the revenues towards investments that strengthen state economies overall rather than Have any bad effect on on economic growth And also help build the case towards reforms both across the country and at the federal level. I mean, I think as Lily mentioned some of these more wide-ranging reforms to tax administration that would go along with some of the bigger federal proposals that we've mentioned would help states move forward as well but there are there are very Simple easy To implement and politically salient ways that states can move forward immediately and capital gains and a statement inheritance taxation And an income taxation as well Michael kink hey Mike kink from Center for popular democracy in the hedge clippers campaign some of the most explosive increases in inequality have been driven by private equity and hedge fund managers on Wall Street and In addition to the infamous carried-interest loophole, I'm sure there's a lot of tax avoidance schemes that are particularly Used in those industries So I was wondering if you have any things to offer campaigners that are trying to fight financialization and the impact of those kinds of players on the economy and on inequality I think the the you know underlying Let's say 85% of and that's a very serious number of the strategies used there Is the opportunity to defer? Tax until assets are sold right the the you know the deferral is the engine that makes all of the other strategies work And so I think you know in all the the policy options We've discussed that that claw back on deferral You know whether that's through through these the taxation of investment income whether it's using wealth itself as the base Whether it's the measurement of income inside corporate solution And I guess I should probably say something about leverage and using interest to strip money out of the corporate base I think all of these are sort of the the You know the the the key ingredient that makes the avoidance strategies there work and so I think you know the the You know all they can provide the direct this sort of the high-level direction for the policy reform to get to I think that the challenge of selling some of these problems in terms of you know Understanding and and explaining you know how deferral works I think is this sort of the the part of the challenge of getting across the finish line for some of those reforms But I think it's this ability to to play by your own rules to avoid reporting your income the idea that that You know a wage earner reports their income every year No questions asked and all of these other strategies depart from the fact that you don't have to or can make it disappear Yeah, just one quick thing I mean as well as that also it's just the the carried interest to the poll is just exploiting the fact that we tax Labor income differently versus capital income and so all the talk here about things that push those together will help And then I'd add something that didn't come up But is a tax that's really progressive and aimed at sort of the heart of financialization destructive Financialization the financial transactions tax. I think should definitely be on the menu of reformers No opposition there, okay. Okay. Thank you My name is Lee young I think our society's a Most urgent issues really justice and fairness What I call is it currently our capitalism. It's not really capitalism It's what I real causes a rubberism. So unless we We really stop this problem Rubberism including current today's the PPP public private partnership Which actually is a rub not only individual but also now rub government even more so Unless you we do just solving this problem government is spending is not controllable and Individual reach is can be suddenly poor and All the social program We when you have money in a government sudden will be deficit. So My question is how are you going to solve this? Problem in order to have a society in a peaceful manner rather than every day you are just Thinking about taxing taxing while you talk to almost nothing because they are robbed by somebody else Yeah, I think that's kind of the question of the day, isn't it? Yeah Anyone want to weigh in on that? I think it goes back to Paul Krugman's point earlier Like the ideas are there like if we actually had the political ability to under to do this the ideas are there They would work the question is organizing the politics to make it possible. I Think the IRS funding pieces really emblematic of that problem since 2010 year after year after year death by a thousand cuts and we really need You know well resourced IRS built back up again in order to get it the income That is already supposedly subject to tax, but it's not being paid over every year And in order to implement some of these Really great policy ideas Right and this afternoon we will have a panel on campaigning around these issues So how to connect the great nitty-gritty research and policy analysis these folks are doing to people who can really push it forward So Yeah, Frank. Hi, Frank Clemente. America's for tax fairness. It's probably more for Lily than anybody else. It's the lawyer up there How much credence do you put in the constitutional questions around the wealth tax and Secondly, I'd like to So if let's say we had we're good enough to adopt mark-to-market And we get an inheritance tax so we get mark-to-market going forward and we get the inheritance tax on In the future How much is a wealth tax or how much is the accumulated wealth that you know that the folks have That isn't captured going forward. How do we how do we deal with that in terms of the mark-to-market issue? So on the constitutionality I Would I'm not a constitutional lawyer, but based on talking to a lot who are I wouldn't put a lot of credence in it as a legal matter But I would in terms of how this court would decide So I think there's a risk that this court Would hold a wealth tax on constitutional. I don't think they should I don't think that's supported but There's a lot of things this court might do that. I wouldn't agree with so I think the way to reduce that legal risk is to frame And to understand a wealth tax as a refinement to the income tax So the constitutional issue is that direct taxes under the constitution have to be apportioned among the states And that means by population and so presumably we wouldn't want a wealth tax that said, you know per capita in Mississippi it has to raise as much as it does in Connecticut and There was a constitutional amendment that said the income tax is not a direct tax so to the extent that we can understand a wealth tax as being a Type of income tax then it should be fine I don't see how even this court could get there And as an example The Netherlands has something called a dual income tax system where they impute a return to wealth each year and tax that imputed income Which is a wealth tax But I think if you you know start framing a wealth tax in in those forums It becomes even lower risk And then I don't think there's really a risk that a mark-to-market tax Would be considered not an income tax We have mark-to-market features within our income tax right now and relatively small areas of it And they've never been challenged constitutionally another reason you might want to have the legal fight or As well as side-stepping it is to recall that that three-fifth that that that apportionment According to population clause is the same clause that had the three-fifths Requirement for how you count up the population so this prohibition against direct taxes Many legal scholars trace that to being part of you know tied up in the the so-called compromise over slavery So the legal argument is that that clause because it is so tainted by the legacy of slavery And because it was in part there to prevent the taxation of types of wealth out of existence including slaves Should be construed extremely narrowly in today's in today's Society I mean again that leaves lilies Legal realism question about whether this court would would do that but It's part of professor Krugman's point that a lot of the reason why we have a tax and fiscal situation that we do have today Does tie back to some of these issues? Get to the second part of that question on So if you had mark-to-market taxation right How do you deal with or what is this what what what policies are needed to deal with the accumulated stocks of wealth? I think this is both a argument for strong wealth transfer taxes as really discussed on the estate or the inheritance side It's also I think part of why you need Realization at death or a gift to make sure you have actually captured all of the accumulated gains And so that they cannot leak out in those two ways I think if you have those two components there isn't a sort of you know You know unblocked path out and they're the key ingredients You could then obviously build on that with with sort of additional taxes, but those are the key elements to prevent the basic leakage Okay, who's the next way in the back duck. Are you getting somebody? Yeah, hi, my name is Victor Turoni, so I really support the idea of using all of these instruments and Partly because I think for two reasons one is that they can reduce avoidance and two is that if you really want to be effective at taxing the wealthy You add those up and you can get it pretty high rates one thing that's missing from this mix is a personal expenditure tax and That's something that Could be used. It's maybe more in the in the middle like the top two or three percent We can get more revenue from them, but I think it's a it's a policy instrument that should be thought about and used because again You it's hard to avoid that and also avoid some of these other things. So it would be an additional arsenal in the in the Weapon in the arsenal. Thank you Have any of you looked at that issue? Should we Okay, thanks for that that comment next question John Starzak know all these various tax schemes Are sound very good, but they're gonna be ineffective unless we get rid of the mechanisms by which the rich Hide their income and wealth And it was extensively described the Guzman spoke the hidden wealth of nations. How do you address that? So I think part of this goes to the IRS enforcement point There is a new regime called fatka Which requires automatic reporting between countries of all financial accounts of US citizens held abroad and Already more than a hundred countries have signed on to that But the problem is the IRS doesn't have the resources to use the data that it's starting to get So I think we really need to have a high wealth squad that's starting to really focus on Finding that hidden wealth Another issue is that the fact the regime only covers financial assets There is a common reporting standard regime that the OECD has been working on and it has over a hundred signatories But the US is not one of them. So There are some, you know relatively straightforward things that we could do and international efforts We could join if we had a better administration Great, maybe we'll take one more anyone have a burning question here Thanks Jerome Sieg on the state chair of the newly formed bread and roses party of Maryland I had Another idea to throw into the mix and it's a wealth tax that deals with a class of assets that is substantial and Doesn't raise legal issues and can't very well be hidden and it's real estate and It's a very good proxy for people's overall wealth holdings We've got a very fine-grained Tax system throughout the country knowing all about people's real estate The problem with it is that it's proportional We've got fixed rate whether you have a a hundred thousand dollar home or a ten million dollar estate And it's a fairly simple change It would seem to me to move towards progressive real estate taxation could be something that kicks in with Houses as if they're over a million or over two million and then goes all the way up and it could be very very powerful My colleague Liz McNichol is actually written about the possibility of doing mansion taxes and moving those immediately in the states as you say Those are the those are the areas in the states where they have regressive tax codes and can Have direct access to these valuations. They're doing them already as part of their property taxes So there's an immediate opportunity there In terms of sort of federal level and real estate taxation I think part of the the issue there is reversing all of the completely upside-down tax breaks that exempt Returns from real estate from taxation at the moment. So things like the mortgage interest deduction All of the various carve-outs from various provisions that real estate got in the 2017 tax law Like kind exchanges or all sorts of different things. I'm sure Lily and Greg and Josh will have their favorites But there's a lot of cleaning up to do I Would just like I have a couple colleagues here Chuck Collins and Jen Wofford who are working at this on the local level in Boston where they've had a Luxury housing boom and have been getting a lot of attention for their Research into the impact of that on the local economy and there's movement around a luxury real estate transfer tax in the state of Massachusetts, so that's an exciting part of our work I think we're going to break a little bit early for lunch because I understand senator Van Hollen is going to come early And so your agenda says that we do lunch and then come back at one But he needs to start at 1250 so please be in your seats for that and let's give a round of applause to our panel